The American Way of Life, a.k.a. consumer capitalism produces a lot of crap — roughly 300 million tons a year, or almost five pounds per person per day, according to EPA figures for 2018, the most recent available. Ulster County's share of it totals about 150,000 tons annually.

“Crap” is not the word favored by government agencies and those in the waste management business. “Municipal solid waste” (MSW) is the term of art. It includes “bottles and corrugated boxes, food, grass clippings, sofas, computers, tires and refrigerators” and, EPA notes, “does not include everything that may be landfilled at the local level, such as construction and demolition (C&D) debris, municipal wastewater sludge and other non-hazardous industrial wastes.”

Here in Ulster County, we've dealt with the stuff by putting it out of sight and out of mind. Specifically, it goes to Seneca Meadows, a landfill about 230 miles and three and a half hours away via the Thruway. So on top of the costs of collecting and sorting our MSW there's the cost of transport — and an accompanying green footprint, in a line of work that's supposed to be about environmental preservation. Irony much?

Problem is Seneca Meadows's current DEC permit expires in December 2025, which is when the landfill is expected to reach capacity. Texas-based Waste Connections, the landfill’s parent company, has applied for a permit to add more space, allowing it to remain open until 2040. But DEC has yet to approve the request. Either way, the county's contract with Seneca Meadows is up at the end of 2024.

All this was well-known to the officials assembled last Thursday morning as the county legislature's UCCRA Reform Committee (UCCRARC?): Mike Baden (committee chair), president of the Ulster County Association of Town Supervisors and Mayors; Tracey Bartels (vice chair), legislative chair designee; Legislator Manna Jo Greene; Comptroller March Gallagher, picked by the legislature’s Republican minority; Deputy County Executive Amanda LaValle; and Jim Gordon, vice-chair of the UCRRA Board of Directors.

“Feels like Groundhog Day,” Bartels told the room, pointing out that some present had been working on Ulster's waste management issues for “20, 30, 40 years.”

We could, theoretically, stash the trash closer to home, in a landfill of our own. Thing is: Not In My Back Yard, since the common perception is that landfills stink and may be hazardous to healthy air, soil and water. In fact, many of Seneca Meadows's neighbors are making a concerted effort to shut down operations there.

The county has in the past flirted with the idea of a local landfill but it's a political hot potato. In July 2021 the Ulster County Resource Recovery Agency (UCRRA) hired Tivoli-based environmental consulting firm Hydroquest to study possible locations. They came up with a few but when it became known that a Plattekill location was recommended, public and political resistance exploded. As a result, the study was buried, available to the public only on request. As UCRRA later explained:

“When the study was reviewed it was determined by UCRRA’s governing board at the time that there would need to be a more comprehensive study performed before any decisions could be made concerning the development of a local landfill. A decision was made to not officially receive the document as a completed report and not use it to inform any decisions concerning the question of a local landfill. Because the report was left as a draft document and would not be used by UCRRA it was not released to the public because it would only serve to cause undo concern by residents.”

If that wasn't enough to assuage the citizenry, the agency added, in bold: “We have not commissioned a new study. We have not decided that a local landfill is feasible. We have not determined a suitable location for a landfill.”

UCRRA's been in business since 1986, when new state regulations forced local governments to find new ways to deal with greater financial and managerial responsibilities for solid waste management. Ulster's legislature responded with the creation of UCCRA, a public authority independent of the county, contracting with it to assume those roles. The county's contract with the agency expires in March 2025. That’s an additional factor in the county's thinking — one that feeds into the idea of absorbing the agency, which has had a tumultuous history, into county government.

The reform committee meeting was the third in a series, the first to focus on disposal, as opposed to diversion of solid waste. Newly installed UCRRA Board Chair Marc Rider was there to update the group on that matter. In his remarks and the freewheeling discussion that followed it was clear that, like it or not, local landfills are back on the table — not as a certainty but neither out of the question and in any case, not anytime soon.

Rider's “near-term” plan is to solicit proposals for waste transport and disposal other than to Seneca Meadows, and to evaluate them with carbon footprints in mind. Such contracts typically run five years, and two Albany-area landfills, less than 100 miles away, have expressed a willingness to take Ulster's MSW. Rider told the committee he's “not sure of any changes [during that time] except possibly location.”

With implications for the idea of landfills within Ulster, Rider spoke of the promise of alternative technologies like biomass and anerobic digestion, turning organic waste into commercially useful methane and, significantly, leaving the remaining waste “a lot friendlier” to landfill host communities. He said UCRRA already has in hand two alternative technology proposals ”worth investigating.”

Skepticism of alternative technologies came from Bartels and UCRRA Vice Chair Gordon, at least if they were implemented by private, for-profit companies. Gordon, who advocates UCRRA's absorption by county government, said, citing climate change, “We're going to need that compost to grow our own food,” while Bartels worried that private operators’ interest in methane production would create “a disincentive to divert” organic waste.

Turning to the matter of the GUS, the failed effort at a coordinated SWM plan incorporating Greene, Ulster and Sullivan counties, which dwindled into nothingness in 2021, Bartels described it as a pretext: “A synonym for ‘Move it somewhere else.’ Sullivan is not interested in accepting any waste at all.”

Neither was there any love for 2021's Hydroquest study, which LaValle faulted as only “a hydrologic study, not a complete evaluation considering noise and roads.” Bartels dismissed it as “throwing darts at a map,” but, importantly, called it “preposterous” that “sitting legislators” claim the study's list of possible Ulster landfills is exhaustive. There have been “unreasonable reactions” to the thought of local landfills, Bartels said, calling diversion “primary” but also calling for “self-reliance.”

“We're partially living in a myth about what a landfill is,” Bartels said. And as the county is “still circling around the idea ... any reliable siting, even at the earliest stages, has to involve getting the whole community to the table.”

Landfills smaller than usual, with presumably less stigma, captured the imagination of Committee Chair Baden. Overcoming popular images of the mammoth, grotesque Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island would, he said, “involve a lot of PR.” (The example of Seneca Meadows is instructive in that regard. Their website includes pages debunking media “myths” and touting the site's Environmental Education Center.)

Any new landfills in Ulster or elsewhere in New York, small or large, won't happen overnight. Given the regulatory issues and the inevitable lawsuits, a 12-year timeline is likely. But as UCRRA's Rider told the group, “We're not going to recycle our way out of the waste crisis.”

“The percentage of goods that can be 'recycled' is no more than 30 percent of the waste stream, and that is being optimistic,” Rider told Kingston Wire via email. “We must all reduce the amount of goods we use, divert what we can out of the waste stream, but the reality is that 60-70 percent of waste can’t be recycled.”

“The carbon footprint that comes with shipping 140,000 tons of municipal solid waste and construction and demolition debris waste a combined 1.8 million miles away to Seneca Meadows is immense,” Rider continued. “We must find another solution. We must rely on science and technology and we must consume less.”